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have a confession to make. I broke one of the Ten Commandments with my daughter. (No, not that commandment! Give me some credit!) But the last one– the one about not “coveting that which belongs to your neighbor.” As some of you know, Andrea is transferring to a new school this year, from an expensive private school in Massachusetts to a much less expensive public school in Virginia where we qualify for a DC Tuition Assistance Grant. So we told her we would help her buy a used car to take with her. We had in mind, say, a 2002 Honda Civic with 50,000 miles. Instead, she found a 2001 Acura with 110,000 miles. Consumer Reports gave it a thumbs up for reliability, and the mechanic tells us it should be good for another 150,000 miles, so we said OK. But here’s the thing: It’s got leather seats! And a sunroof! It’s nicer than my car! I am jealous of my daughter’s car! I am guilty of coveting that which belongs to my neighbor!

      One of the reasons it was important to me to go to Guatemala on my sabbatical was not just to improve my Spanish, but because I have learned over the years that I need a periodic immersion in a Third World context to regain my spiritual equilibrium. I know many people, and I admire them, who truly do not care about the nicer things in life. They would just as soon eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich as dine on filet mignon, don’t mind sleeping in a single bed, think it’s silly for every family member to have separate bathrooms, wouldn’t think of hiring a cleaning service, never spend their entire paycheck, and actually like “Two Buck Chuck.” Try as I might, I’m just not one of them. I like nice restaurants, I’ve never turned down a pay raise, I can’t imagine living without air-conditioning, I worry about my retirement savings, and I really could get used to those leather seats!

      So Jesus’ words in our text for this morning strike particularly close to home. That’s why Guatemala was so important to me. I realize there is a certain irony in that it is my relative wealth that enables me to travel to such places as Mexico and Cuba and the Palestinian West Bank. But I need those periodic shocks to my system to remind me–again–that our culture is selling us a bill of goods. It was the most vivid lesson of living as an exchange student in a small Mexican town when I was seventeen years old. Most of my friends in Mexico lacked even the most basic luxuries that we took for granted back home, yet it seemed not to have made any difference whatsoever in their quality of life. Recent studies about happiness in America have reached the same conclusion. Not surprisingly, those who live in abject poverty and worry over their next meal report the lowest levels of personal happiness. But beyond a basic lower-middle class standard of living, researchers found no correlation between income and happiness. Those making $200,000 a year were no happier than those making $50,000. At a certain level we all know that, yet we spend most of our lives on the consumer treadmill because we just can’t believe it’s so. Who can blame us? We spend an hour or so at church on Sunday hearing the gospel’s counter-narrative, and then are bombarded for the rest of the week with promises that the latest gizmo will bring contentment to our lives.

      Isn’t it absolutely astonishing to learn that Jesus’ listeners wrestled with the exact same issue two thousand years ago? Before Wall Street, before Madison Avenue, before the internet, Jesus still felt it necessary to warn, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

      More than any other gospel, Luke focuses rather intensely on the danger of wealth. Scholars believe that is so in part because his likely audience were relatively prosperous Roman citizens. In our culture– even in the church– if we talk about money it is usually because we don’t have enough of it. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus talks about money for the opposite reason: because someone has or wants too much of it.

I n our culture it’s harder to see the connection between our own wealth and another’s poverty. It’s not common knowledge to most Americans that the $5 cup of coffee we buy at Starbucks only puts subsistence wages in the pockets of the Guatemalan farm workers who harvest the beans. That connection would have been palpable to Jesus’ listeners. I still go the Starbucks from time to time, but I can no longer do so without seeing the faces of the coffee growers I was privileged to meet face to face. Yet Jesus’ concern here is not only for the poor who do not have enough, but for the welfare of the rich who have too much. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” Jesus teachers. The word we translate “life” is the Greek word psyche, which as Brian Stoffregen points out, means something like soul, spirit, breath, personality, life-force– that part of you that makes you “you” and me “me.” Your “true self,” Jesus teaches, does not consist in the abundance of possessions. Instead of storing up treasures for yourself, he urges, be rich toward God.

      I suppose we could spend the rest of our lives figuring out exactly what that means. What exactly is it that constitutes your true self?

      I met some people in Guatemala whose “true self” seemed self evident:

•     I met Rigoberto Zamora, the director of the language school I attended. A former seminarian, Rigoberto founded the language school to fund a children’s literacy project that brings books and computers into school libraries in Guatemala’s rural areas.

•     I met Joy Houston and her husband, Jack, who moved to Guatemala in retirement after Joy had served for six months as a Presbyterian “accompanier” during the Guatemalan Civil War, living with Guatemalan Presbyterian clergy and families whose lives had been threatened by the U. S.-funded military death squads.

•     I met Sue Patterson, who returned to Guatemala after having served as a US AID worker, and founded a clinic that provides comprehensive family planning and cervical cancer testing to Native American women where cancer rates and death during childbirth are several times the rate of the U.S.

•     I met Ellen Dozier, a Presbyterian mission co-worker who has lived in Guatemala for the past nine years, working with the Presbyterian Church of Guatemala– the oldest Protestant community in the country– teaching Bible study methods to Presbyterian women, especially in small towns and villages.

      None of these people worried about their next meal, although none had much in the way of material wealth either. But they all seemed rich towards God.

F lorence Ferrier, a social worker in a poverty-stricken area of Apppalachia, tells the story of visiting the Sheldon family in a ramshackle house they rented at the edge of the woods. Despite a painful physical handicap, Mr. Sheldon had shot and butchered a bear which strayed into their yard once too often. The meat had been processed into all the big canning jars they could find or swap. There would be meat in their diet even during the worst of the winter when their fuel costs were high. Mr. Sheldon offered her a jar of the bear meat.

      “I hesitated to accept it,” she writes, but Mr. Sheldon insisted. “Now you just have to take this. We want you to have it. We don’t have much, that’s a fact; but we ain’t poor!”

      Surprised by his comments, she asked, “What’s the difference?”

      This was his answer:

      “When you can give something away, even when you don’t have much, then you ain’t poor. When you don’t feel easy giving something away even if you got more’n you need, then you’re poor, whether you know it or not.”

      May we all learn to be rich towards God.

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© 2006 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel